I think I'm a part of the first generation of journalists to skip print media entirely, and I've learned a lot these last few years at Forbes. My work has appeared on TVOvermind, IGN, and most importantly, a segment on The Colbert Report at one point. Feel free to follow me on Twitter or on Facebook, write me on Facebook or just email at paultassi(at)gmail(dot)com. I'm also almost finished with my sci-fi novel series, The Earthborn Trilogy.

It May Be Time For Nintendo To Make Games, Not Consoles

It’s a little worrisome, writing this post. The opinion I’m about to put forth is one that can get you laughed out of game journalism, and one few people in the industry will even entertain. It’s the idea that Nintendo has lost their way when it comes to the home console game, and they should pivot to their obvious strength that has carried them through lackluster systems for more than a decade now, their incredible games. In short, the Wii U should be Nintendo’s last console, and they should start focusing on bringing their beloved stable of characters to as many households as humanly possible, across every competitor system from Microsoft to Sony to PC. I don’t relish writing columns I know for a fact will get me mocked or insulted, yet here I am, and I’ll attempt to explain this as rationally as I can.

After reading both, I have my doubts about either of their remedies for what ails Nintendo. Kohler’s primary argument is that Nintendo is being held back by the expensive gamepad, which is adding at least another $100 to the price of the system while offering little value to players at it’s an increasingly optional part of gameplay. His suggestion is to divorce the Wii U from the gamepad and sell it for much, much cheaper than its Xbox One and PS4 competition from Microsoft and Sony.

I disagree with this notion. Take away the Wii U’s gamepad, and the price doesn’t matter. Why? Because even if you’re selling the system at $200, that’s about how much used/discounted Xbox 360s and PS3s are currently going for now that this new generation has arrived. The Wii U has graphical capabilities on par with those systems, and well below its next-gen competition. Price it that low with no gamepad and you’re simply selling a decidedly last-gen system that happens to sell new Nintendo games. Few people want to buy a brand new piece of technology that already feels five years old.

It’s important to keep in mind it’s not only about “games looking better” when we reference the power of a system, which will be mentioned frequently throughout this piece. The other factor at play is that if your system isn’t living up to the current next-gen standards, third party companies will simply abandon you altogether as it’s too much work to be downscaling fully next-gen games to run on what is now in effect “older architecture,” even if it’s your brand new pride and joy. Not to mention they’ll do the same if they feel pigeonholed into jamming in motion controls or gamepad features into games that don’t really need them. Whatever third party games do manage to make it to your system are almost certainly better on your competitor’s machines. It happened with the Wii and history is repeating itself with the Wii U. Can you imagine a Sony or Microsoft system that had to survive almost entirely on its exclusives alone? I’d be writing articles likes this about them as well.

Erik Kain has another idea for Nintendo, one that runs completely in the opposite direction. He wants them to more or less acknowledge the failure of the Wii U and start immediately thinking about their next console, the “Super Wii.” He says that after a few years in development, it could debut in the middle of this new console generation as a system more advanced than either Microsoft’s Xbox One or Sony’s PS4, offering free online service and guaranteed 1080p 60 fps titles with boatloads of third party support.

I love this idea, in theory, as obviously it sounds like the dream console the Wii U should have been. Unfortunately, I think in practice it’s something of an impossibility. Even given a few more years, I don’t believe that Nintendo is capable of developing a console that outperforms the Xbox One or PS4. It took the better part of six years of the Wii’s lifecycle for them to develop the Wii U, which barely outperforms the Xbox 360 and PS3 at best. Nintendo has never demonstrated that they’re able to be ahead of the technology curve compared to its competition, and I don’t see any way that’s going to change. Rather, their systems have succeeded for one reason and one reason only, their games.

It’s time to admit a simple truth. Nintendo has not made a good video game console in three generations now.

Now, before you start yelling, this statement is going to need some clarification. I’m speaking about the Wii U, Wii and Gamecube, as before that, Nintendo was more or less on their A-game and hardware wasn’t as much of an issue. And “good” is referring to the technical capabilities of the console and supposed gameplay “innovations,” not the games released for the systems.

I am not suggesting Nintendo completely remove themselves from the hardware game. They have done very well with handhelds, and it would be silly to abandon that portion of the market at this point, even with the rise of smartphones and tablets. At this point saying Nintendo should jettison their popular portables and sell Pokemon as a $2.99 app is a bridge too far and an idea that often sinks this entire argument, so I’m speaking only of their home consoles here.

Taking the games out of the equation, each of Nintendo’s past three consoles were inferior to their competition. The Wii U is a last-gen system from a power perspective as we’ve discussed already. The original Wii was similarly far behind the 360 and PS3. The Gamecube was more powerful relative to its generational competition, but still didn’t fare well against the blockbuster PS2. The N64 vs. original PlayStation divide isn’t quite as stark, so I’m hesitant to say the situation was equivalent and I’m leaving them out. But that was over 15 years ago now, and I want to focus more on Nintendo’s more recent generations where this problem has slowly mutated into something ugly.

In the end, the Gamecube was regarded as a relative a miss for Nintendo despite all our fond memories of Mario Sunshine and Smash Bros. Melee, and the Wii U seems to be following that same path. The main reason Nintendo has any credibility in the console game right now was how badly the original Wii trounced the competition in the last generation in terms of worldwide sales when everyone underestimated how that system would perform.

But I think it’s become clear to most the Wii was a fluke, a fad, and I’m willing to call it a creative failure despite its sales numbers. It only created the illusion Nintendo had executed some grand master plan to win the decade, when really they just sort of stumbled into it. Admittedly, Nintendo did an expert job convincing non-gamers from toddlers to grandparents that they must own a Wii to play virtual golf or tennis by swinging a Wiimote. People of all age groups and backgrounds had a blast playing games like those on their newly bought, relatively inexpensive Wiis.

For a month, maybe two.

After that? There was no big conversion. Non-gamers didn’t magically start buying traditional video game titles and playing their Wiis regularly like gamers were playing their 360s and PS3s. Most hastily purchased Wiis started collecting dust, never to be turned on again.

Nor did Nintendo change the video game landscape with its “innovative” motion controls. Outside of its sports titles, motion controls did not catch on, and most gamers would agree nearly every game is better without them, even those games designed expressly for that purpose. Microsoft tried to expand on the motion idea with Kinect, but again, outside of a few niche genre titles, motion control has not changed the industry significantly at this point.

The problem with the Wii is that you can’t repeat a fluke. You can’t predict a fad. Nintendo thought their Wii U gamepad would be the same sort of game changer for their new system. But this time, the concept didn’t prove its worth to the types of non-gamers who shelled out for the Wii, the type that never touched the system again after the initial fun of digital bowling faded. Nintendo may have attracted millions of new customers with the Wii, but because the system was indeed lackluster at its core when the concept of motion control was revealed to be two-dimensional, they didn’t retain any of their newfound non-gaming fans, and lost the trust of much of their hardcore audience in the process.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that Nintendo simply cannot keep up in the hardware game. If the justification for their underpowered, gimmick-reliant systems generation after generation is that “well, they have good games,” then why the hell doesn’t Nintendo just focus on what they do best? Making games?

Going back to Kohler’s piece, he says this is a “poison pill” for Nintendo, and would surely seal their fate.

“Nintendo’s games sell millions of copies because it makes hardware, not in spite of that. The idea that Mario on Xbox would sell Call of Duty numbers is a pipe dream.”

I couldn’t disagree with this more, and I don’t understand where this notion comes from. Nintendo’s hardware is consistently worse than that of its competition. Outside of the obvious performance and graphical issues, their recent gameplay gimmicks like motion control and the gamepad often make their games worse than they would be otherwise, while driving the price of the system up. It’s why Kohler himself says Nintendo should rid itself of the Wii U’s gamepad to move more units.

But still, despite obviously inferior hardware, people still buy Nintendo systems and love them. Why? Because they love the games, not necessarily the system. If this isn’t the definition of selling games in spite of hardware rather than because of it, I don’t know what is. It’s why people are constantly saying that Nintendo needs “system sellers” to get the Wii U back on track. They need to make games so good, people overlook that the system itself is physically inferior to its competition in nearly every way. I keep repeating this and it may sound harsh, but it’s an inescapable, technological fact.

I also cannot believe the statement that Nintendo wouldn’t sell millions of copies of games in its many beloved series were they available across Sony’s PS4, Microsoft Xbox One or the PC. You can point to numbers like Super Mario World barely moving over a 100,000 copies at launch, but the primary reason for that is because the Wii U is selling so terribly.

You can’t tell me that if Nintendo was suddenly a software-only company they wouldn’t be one of the biggest games in town right alongside EA and Activision. Imagine if the Xbox One or PS4 launched with a new Zelda or Metroid title. They would have been some of the best selling launch games by a mile. We wouldn’t be talking about how poorly the Wii U is selling, we’d be reporting on how excellent Nintendo’s latest games are and how well they’re selling across all platforms.

Every time this is mentioned, the conversation always turns to SEGA. After struggling to be competitive in the console market in the Dreamcast era, SEGA went software only. Though they’re still around, after being a former titan of the industry, they’re barely relevant anymore, content to pair Sonic with his former rival Mario in Olympic-themed Wii games.

But we need to be clear about something. Nintendo is not SEGA. Mario is not Sonic. Not only is Mario a much more storied franchise that has kept making consistently fantastic games for decades while Sonic slowly got worse over time, it’s that Nintendo’s stable is so much more than just Mario. SEGA had Sonic, and maybe Shinobi, Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio and Panzer Dragoon if you’re feeling nostalgic. Nintendo has Mario and Zelda, Kirby, Metroid, Donkey Kong, Kirby, Yoshi, Earthbound, Pikmin, Pokemon, Mario Kart, Smash Bros, all beloved series and household names that have stood the test of time, and a huge catalog to draw from if Nintendo was allowed to spend its resources only designing games instead of tearing their hair out about Wii U sales and trying to guess which new controller-based gimmick might save them.

Nintendo does not make competitive consoles anymore, and their abysmal marketing only makes things worse. They’re only saved by the extremely high quality first-party games made for their systems, and the obvious outlier of the meteoric Wii fad.

It’s sad to see a game as good as Super Mario 3D World sell only 100,000 copies at launch. It’s unfortunate that I can’t play the new Super Smash Bros. or Zelda unless I shell out $300 for a system with no third party support, last-generation graphics and a gamepad I don’t even want to use.

But if Nintendo simply let go of their home console dreams (as I said, they can stay in the handheld market, which they still seem to understand), they could become a hugely powerful 3rd party force with more clout than EA or Activision, if they’re able to consistently produce amazing games like they have since their inception. Their hardware is holding them back, preventing them from making boatloads of money through cross platform software, and depriving gamers of playing amazing titles because they don’t want to own a technologically lackluster console when there are much better options on the market.

I don’t know why saying this makes me a pariah in the gaming industry. It’s not a forecast of doom and gloom, it’s a path for Nintendo to live on indefinitely, retaining their status as a creator of the best video games on the market while free from the expectations of consoles that simply can’t keep pace with their rivals. I’m not saying it’s the only way forward for Nintendo, but I also don’t think the switch to software would be the deathblow for the company everyone thinks it would be. When you’re only meeting 5% of your console sales projections in a given year, I think the Wii U itself is more likely to be the executioner’s axe than anything I’m proposing here.

I love Nintendo. I want nothing more than to see them thrive for as long as video games exist. But I don’t think it’s necessarily the worst thing in the world if they live on doing the thing they do best, making games, rather than home consoles. Nearly all the beloved memories you have of Nintendo are from the amazing original games they’ve produced, not the systems that played them. It’s hard to extract one from the other, but if you think about it, you know it’s true. I’m a lifelong Nintendo fan who had to abandon the brand because the games were no longer worth putting up with the increasingly irritating hardware. But I would buy a copy of every single Nintendo game the moment they were released for my Xbox or PlayStation, and I suspect I’m not alone.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

I’ve spoken about this before in closed circles, because I believe it is the only way we will continue to get these games to a wider audience. My excitement for the new zelda games has waned to non existence because regardless of how good they may be, i can’t bring myself to play it on a system that i feel is either gimmicky, or just not as good as the competition. Once Nintendo goes the way of Sega, and sticks to software, not hardware, I am more curious to see if Microsoft or Sony will fight for exclusivity rights to the name. That will be a fun fight.

So, If a new zelda game is a masterpiece you just cannot be excited to play it because is not on PS or Xbox?? Last time I checked, what matter is the game itself, not the console (or pc) you play it in. Im just sick of reading that “nintendo is doomed” since the N64 days….

No, it’s that even if a new Zelda game is a masterpiece, I don’t want to spend $300 on a console I wouldn’t want otherwise just to play it. What matters IS the game itself, NOT the console as you say, which is the entire point of this article. And suggesting Nintendo move to software does not mean it’s being classified as “doomed.” I don’t know why those ideas have to overlap.

The hardware that Nintendo provides will evolve. I think they will provide a tablet device with built in LTE or other broadband radio. Right now the Wii U is a failure and the games are not saving it. The next console will integrate both. It will provide great graphics and the capability of smartphone/tablet/console. Nintendo will be the new Apple or they get bought by Microsoft.

I just dont get all the hate to Nintendo because they are having a bad time, but when the PS3 was all doomed people seem to stick by it…. Whats the point of owning a PS4 or Xbox One right now? For me is NONE due to the fact that there are no games for it (all good games i can get on either console I can get them on a PS3, 360 or PC) … Nintendo has proven that they do good consoles (home or handheld) and they definitely do excellent games. Even 3rd party games on Wii U are just as good or a bit better on Wii U due to do the gamepad. CoD for example have advantages over other console versions like persisten map, many many controller options, Co-op like one on TV and the other one in the gamepad, Assasins creed also has provided good support on gamepad… Zelda WW has proven to be very well implemented with the gamepad, mario 3d World also… I just see a lot of people complaining about a console they have not even tried (not that the author hasnt, i do think he has)… The Wii U is even backward compatible jesuschrist… and there are many many good games on Wii that can be played perfectly on Wii U (which also helps people to upgrade to the new console) … Nintendo just need to deliver the SW, and they are doing it. they need to provide better services on the console, and they are doing it, and everything at a affordable price. I just dont get the “hate”… Remember all those articles about the 3DS being the begining of the end of Nintendo?? :|

@John Perez, it’s not Nintendo hate, they are just facts. True PS3 had a rough start, it struggled through bad sales, but after a cuople of price cuts and and awsome library of games it proved once again that it was a top contender, even now it has sold out the Xbox 360, it’s biggest rival!

On the other hand we have Nintendo that has not made a truly great console with the kind of third party support the NES or SNES once had, sure the Wii sold like hot cakes but it lacked the third party support all consoles need to succeed, so we’ve seen Nintendo fumble around with this for the past three generations, it can’t be just coincidence.

I forgot where I read where it said PS3 had outsold the Xbox 360, but ok it’s not important let’ say they are neck and neck. Going back to main point, third party support SHOULD matter to a console company like Nintendo, I wrote this in a post on this very article, this is what lack of third party support did for me, and while I admit it’s my personal experience I’m sure many other gamers felt the same.

“I love Nintendo games I grew up with them, my last Nintendo console was the N64, but that console in spite of awsome games like Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time just could hold against outstanding games that where coming out left and right for the Playstation (the PS1) so I caved in and traded my N64 for a brand new PS1 jumped onthe PS bandwagon and never looked back since”

I don’t think nintendo as a whole is doomed, but i think they could very well ditch their consoles, with the exception of their handhelds (which hurts me to say as i love my vita) and push their software to the other companies much like Sega did. Sega still exists today because of that choice, and we all benefit from it to some extent (not everyone is a sonic fan). My main problem is that I cannot justify a console purchase based on 1 or 2 games. That reason alone has kept me from buying a ps4 or xbox one for now as well.

I believe that for some who love Nintendo also have to be realistic about the console. Also I think people seem to ignore the magic that Nintendo has always been in our culture and so forth. I am not a fan of Playstation or Microsoft solely based on the culture of gaming that is occurring more rapidly, and it is not a positive one. Bullying, trolling, and ego plays big into this whether we acknowledge it or not. I have grew up with Nintendo and enjoy it for its humble games as that is how I live my life. Simple and humble and the Nintendo console reflects that for me.

As far as gimmicky goes, well I suppose this is a tricky thing. What is gimmick and innovation?

Well You bought the “other” system for a particular game no doubt, so your $300 comment is moot, if you want to play the game, you will pay the money, otherwise you really don’t care for the game as much as you say.

Nintendo doesn’t have to rake it all in, they can be as big or as niche as they want to be and they will always be profitable.

More money is not the answer, and Nintendo doesn’t work by how much will be in their check books and thats great news for everyone!

So why i should pay for a “superior console” than dosent have any good game, Instead an “inferior and cheaper one” that have excellent exclusives? That argument of “stop making consoles” should be say when Steambox arrives and destroys PS4 and XONE…More powerful and the same value of a PS4.

Or the PC for that matter. Best visuals, best framerate, less glitches, mods and ironically, cheaper games. The new consoles look like limited PCs and I fear game prices may rise when the next gen tech takes off instead of just making current gen look nicer.

The issue John is the game will not be near as successful as it should be since it will be released on a system that no one really wants. Therefore Nintendo as a business will not do near as good since they have an extremely limited base to sell games to.

So, you’re saying that is the ONLY game you’d even consider playing? There are several great games on the system now that make it a good purchase. New Super Mario Bros. U, Nintendo Land, Super Mario 3D World, Pikmin 3, Lego City Undercover, ZombieU, Wonderful 101 are some of the system worthy offerings available right now only on Wii U, with more to come. Look at the flip side, the majority of the content on a Nintendo console is exclusive. If you buy a PS4, you won’t really miss out on much from the XBox, and vice versa. What you do miss out on may very well be on PC also.

The Wii U produces beautiful 1080p content. It has a social network built in that isn’t full of hate mongering. It has FREE online multiplayer. It has access to the full Wii library including digital and virtual console. It supports the best motion controls of the past generation and has a solid traditional controller in addition to the gamepad. The gamepad allows for artistic expression games like Art Academy. I wish that EA would lose its exclusive license with the NFL. It would be great to have an NFL game that used the game pad to literally draw plays and implement them in ways that isn’t possible with other controllers. The system itself has more going for it than spec sheet comparisons of polygon counts can convey.

The majority of households aren’t going to invest in 4K TVs, which, ironically, will probably have many of the features that the Xbox One is touting to sell its system built in. Many new Smart TVs already come close and are adding more features all the time. 1080i is likely to remain the standard for television for over a decade or more.

Let’s face the facts. Nintendo is a game company. They don’t have to be the biggest (even though they are one of the biggest). They just need to be profitable. I personally like that they aren’t focusing on quarterly projections and are looking at the long game. I think too many business focus on 3 month strategies that can be detrimental to long term health.

Nintendo has been around over 120 years and has been in the video game industry for over 30. You don’t stay in the game that long without knowing what you’re doing.

It would be dumb for Nintendo to make Zelda or Mario games available on any other platform. Every system has its own exclusive game. Its called competition!! Nintendo- Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong. Playstation has Uncharted. Xbox has Gears of War.

So. Microsoft, Playstation, and Nintendo should get together and just make one big system and take turns putting games out for it!! Hell, while we are at it lets put McDonalds and Burger King together so no one has to choose between the Whopper and the Big Mac!!

It’s retarded to suggest Nintendo make their main titles available everywhere. There would be no competition. It would be pointless. If you want to play Gears of War you have to buy an Xbox. If you want to play Uncharted you have to buy a Playstation. Why shouldn’t it be the same with Nintendo?? I have an Xbox. I have the Wii and Wii U. There are games I like to play on each. I would not want to play Mario on an Xbox 360! It also should be taken into account that Wii is more of a family oriented system while Playstation and Xbox are geared more toward hard core gamers. Those people have NO desire to play family oriented games. Why combine them?? A system has to have a “mascot”!

Sega was in a much different place than Nintendo is when they threw in the console towel. The Wii-U has been out a year. Before it, the Wii sold 100+ million units. And before that, the Gamecube sold a respectable/profitable amount. Sega was not profitable, they were near death. Nintendo? Not so much. Alarmist reactions aren’t helping anybody, and apples and oranges comparisons aren’t credible discourse.

so pay 500 for a halo box? You buy a nintendo for 1st party, and PC for all the rest of the games; 2k, CoD, AC, bioshock cough, TF, LoL, ect.

Even if you *need* an xbox or PS, you know the 2nd console will be a nintendo. Let xbox and ps fight for a spot in a living room, and let nintendo be in *every* living room.

Plus nintendo likes to innovate, and some of their console games’ charm comes from them building fantastic games on their hardware innovations. If you want to play their games on a “classic” controller; get a 3DS.

I kind of hold it the same way with the other consoles too to be honest. I was a “console gamer” (well I had consoles) in the SNES/Sega Mega or Genesis time when consoles were a lot different from the PC and each other and was also a big Nintendo fan, GameBoy included and all that. Mario (Super Mario Bros., Mario Kart, Mario on the GameBoy) was probably one of my favorite franchises back then, but after the N64 I simply couldn’t be bothered anymore and the other consoles (Sony/Microsoft) could never offer me what a PC could and still can’t do it even to this day.

The few games that I really wanted to play usually come out on PC albeit delayed. For instance I really, really wanted to play L.A. Noire and even thought about borrowing a console from a friend to play it but instead decided to wait and got it on PC. I kind of wanted to play Alan Wake and Brütal Legend and got them both on PC. I was very curious about Dark Souls since everybody was talking about it and got it on PC. I’m sure GTA V will arrive on the PC sometime in April or May next year.

Even most of the early Microsoft Exclusives like Halo 1+2 and Gears of War came out on PC, although I could never bother with Halo and Gears of War was an alright CoOp game I played with a friend, but nothing I would lose any sleep over missing out on.

My list of games that I would want to play and are only available on consoles at this point is rather short and includes titles like Red Dead Redemption, Lollipop Chainsaw, Dante’s Inferno, Shadows of the Damned, Dragon’s Dogma, possibly Catherine and as far as SONY goes the Uncharted series, Demon’s Souls, Dragon’s Crown and maaaybe Infamous.

But you know what? None of these games will make me buy a console I see as inherently useless otherwise and take the added DRM/control by companies like Microsoft or SONY for ~200$/€+ as well as their requirement of paying a monthly fee to use their Online services. I just couldn’t be bothered; I’d rather just spend money to upgrade my PC further even if I don’t really need to. Especially since I have dozens upon dozens of games I haven’t even touched yet on Steam or GOG waiting for me (From some of the games that came out in the last few years I still have to play Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Far Cry 3, Dead Space 3, Risen 2 and the Metro 2033/Last Light series as well as finish the Darksiders series and I just now started playing RAGE and GTA: Episodes from Liberty City. If anything I’m WAY behind with the games I’ve already bought on one single platform alone).

Anyway, if the developers want some of my money, they know where to find me. This includes Nintendo by the way, I only bought three of their games “for the Wii” since I ended up emulating them, which would be New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Super Mario Galaxy and Epic Mickey but it would be a lot less hassle if they’d just offer their games on my platform of choice by themselves and I’d likely buy a lot more (I never was a Zelda or Metroid fan, but I’d be game for most Mario titles, Donkey Kong, Mario Kart and possibly Pikmin).

” Every system has its own exclusive game. Its called competition!!” Regarding this argument every time it comes up, it is false. Nobody NEEDS or has even *asked* for competition through consoles in this way. If there was even a single platform, there would still be competition between all the studios trying to make games and sell them.

I find the entire system in regards to “Exclusives” and company-owned gaming platform kind of questionable to start with. In a better world they could just decide on a single standard (like say your basic Linux-running computer) that all companies could agree upon (or forced to) and then each company could continue making their own version of it and market it/sell it to people and compete that way.

This is how it works with TVs today. You don’t get specific content that you can only watch on a “Sony” or “Samsung” or “LG” TV, but decide which one you want to buy based on features and quality and then can watch exactly the same movies and TV shows on either model. You aren’t being locked out of any content by your choice of viewing device or by your Blu-Ray or DVD player.

Luckily the US Supreme Court has managed to prevent creating or allowing an eco-system where everyone could lock their content away and only show it in specific places or only on specific devices a long time ago and managed to create an ecosystem where everybody has to compete against each other only based on the quality of the content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc. The consumer is the one winning in such a case.

Skyward Sword is one of the most fun games I’ve played since the 80′s. Hotline Miami is the second game that I will say trumps all games this generation and it’s a pixel overhead shooter. It’s way better than any game one both the XBOXone and PS4.

closed circles…..I have a wii u, and a ps4. The wii u is by far in my opinion more innovative then anything this console gen. You blow in the controller to make mario fly up stuff…I had a young women over and she was shocked by that….I had some breaded chicken on the stove for Parmesan and I walked in there playing NSMB…EPIC, INNOVATIVE…Sorry nintendo doesn’t give a shit about your graphics and your online play..No wait, I am not sorry at all…If I spent 200 bucks and I only play a few games it was money well spent. I am more excited for yoshi yarn then any ps4 game upcoming…That is the truth, all though I despise shooting games.

Check the numbers, wii sold over 100 million consoles worldwide, you sound narrowminded and uneducated….Now go see what the xbox and ps3 sold little boy…How are you a writer on forbes…oh yeah forbes has no respect, says the NYC executive :)

OK… Gamecube may have not played DVDs, but powerwise was between PS2 and XBOX… all of those consoles in that generation were comparable in capabilities and there was not a clear winner between them regarding power. Just look at the best looking games on GC…. Resident Evil 4 or Wind Waker… no PS2 game was even close to that one….

When Nintendo stops being stupidly profitable (maybe because they keep pushing great games on “inferior” hardware), then maybe they can consider going the way of the Sega. Until then… what insanity is this you speak of!?

Not saying the Wii U hasn’t been a bit of a drag. I agree with the sentiment that the tablet-like gamepad really gouges the sleek, simplified image they established with the Wiimotes. A WiiSlab-less offering would go a long way to allaying those fears.

But to be honest, I haven’t bought one because I’m waiting for that cashcow/killerapp game, Smash Bros. That’s the tipping point so many buyers are waiting for, and when that hits, the pent up demand for great games like the recent Marios will be satisfied. After that, the snowball of installed-base can really get rolling. The Wii U situation could look VERY different this time next year.

I’m actually starting to wonder if a soft-launch of the console was part of the plan…

I don’t see how poor console sales at launch could be part of any plan. First off, it makes developers wary of creating new titles for the system, which gets you into the cyclical problem that Nintendo is currently facing. Second, how does a year of pain help the company in any way? The Wii U launched over a year ago and has already been outsold by the Xbox One and PS4 in every major market. Honestly, I didn’t even know the Wii U existed until I started reading articles about how poorly it’s been doing. I don’t know anybody that owns one, I don’t remember seeing any major ads about it, and I’ve never heard any of my family, friends, or co-workers talk about it.

I agree that the newest Super Smash Bros. is a title that *could* save it from an early death, but I certainly wouldn’t bet any money on it. I love those games and it’s one of the main reasons I bought the Wii. Having said that, I won’t be spending $300 on the console + $50 (?) for the game + however much it is for 3 extra controllers (after all, it’s multi-player and I’d want the full experience). I wouldn’t even spend half that amount.

Stupidly profitable? Are you serious? They were with the Wii, but not with the Wii U. The Wii had a great gimmick that propelled them to success, not a great system. Guessing on a gimmick is a tricky game to play and it is showing with the Wii U. They are effectively trying to cut themselves out of the handheld market with the Wii U. Why introduce a product to cut into your own sales?

Hey Billy Bob, how about looking at just how many they sold for their other consoles as well hmm? Might give you a good perspective at how profitable nintendo is rather than acting like the Wii is the only system they’ve ever had. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles

Nintendo’s consoles will only be handhelds in the future. The next console will be a tablet and have only digital games no media at all. They most likely will not be providing games for all consoles like Sega did.

The thing is, articles like this are always seem as being “anti-Nintendo,” but they’re not. I want more Nintendo games on more systems because they’re the best games out there. I just don’t want to purchase their home consoles which I view as not worth the investment for their first party titles alone. Why do we have to call Nintendo “doomed” when we’re just suggesting they adapt to a changing market?

Why they should be the one adapting? I havent see any article suggesting that Sony should retire the PS Vita (which is selling like crap ever since it came out) or when the PS3 was very bad during the first 2 years in the market… on when the 360 had more technical problems than a 20 years old car…. I just dont ge the hate…

YOU don’t want to buy it. Why should they adapt? Most people are waiting for a price drop to the $200-$250 range and also games like Super Smash Bros. That’s why people have a problem with articles like this….you guys are making a big deal out of your personal preferences and passing them off as some type of journalism. People read it and perceptions are built off or your guys “assesments” (a lot of which is false) and that perception spreads. Don’t believe me? Just check out the sheer NUMBERS of articles bemoaning the Wii U and spelling out doom for Nintendo. You guys do much more damage than you realize. Meanwhile, Black Friday and Cyber Monday Wii bundles that were priced at $250 at Target and Overstock sold out. Your opinions aren’t taking into consideration the entire picture: past, present, and future.